We've ignored the boot screen code and interface for too long and its time for a make over. Specifically I'm speaking about the boot option menus. We're going to focus just on that and ignore everything else in boot mode (frankly everything else in boot mode is looking okay right now I think). Right now the boot options is just a single vertical menu window whose contents change based on what option you selected to change (video, audio, etc). Here's a very rough first draft at improving it.

I made the menu layout and interface similar to shop mode's interface on purpose. The shop mode interface looks great and its nice if our GUI menus have some consistency to them. With that you'll notice three horizontal windows. The top window contains the main option categories, or when an option category is selected it will contain the name of just that category (e.g. "Audio"). The middle window contains the settings to change or in this case, an overview of the active game settings. The bottom window I thought may serve as kind of an "tool tip" or prompt window. For example, when selecting the sound volume option in the Audio menu, the bottom window may display "Use the left and right command inputs to change the sound volume". Or when the user tries to overwrite a saved profile file the prompt may ask "This file already exists, do you wish to overwrite it? (Yes / No)"

You'll notice that I removed the separate windows for key settings and joystick settings and consolidated them into one section called "Input". Within Input the user could cycle through the window the keyboard settings and attached joystick settings using the left select and right select commands. Also the main options "New Game... Quit" would not be drawn when the options window is open. They are just there in this draft because I am lazy.

Here are my initial thoughts.

(1): Not sure if the bottom window is needed. The tooltip help idea is nice, but it might be superfluous.

(2): I think that perhaps the window width could be shortened. Right now its 800 pixels long and it seems like it will result in a lot of empty space.

(3): I thought that maybe the active profile name could always be drawn on top of the top window border ("Active profile: default"), that way its clear what active profile was loaded or is in use.

(4): I think that we might also want to have a "modified" indicator on the main options menu to indicate that some options were changed since the menu opened. Maybe each individual option in all the menus can also have an icon image that is drawn next to the option when it is modified as well.

(5): Do we want to dynamically change the size (probably just the height) of the middle window based on the number of options available? Just a thought.

The main aspects I want us to come to a decision on first are the window sizes and layouts. I'm not going to do a draft for every single menu here, although I may make another draft for an example of one particular sub-menu. But I just wanted to get the discussion started here. schmoopy is going to be doing this work initially, so we want to give him a good idea of a starting direction before the weekend.

Roots wrote:(1): Not sure if the bottom window is needed. The tooltip help idea is nice, but it might be superfluous.

(2): I think that perhaps the window width could be shortened. Right now its 800 pixels long and it seems like it will result in a lot of empty space.

(3): I thought that maybe the active profile name could always be drawn on top of the top window border ("Active profile: default"), that way its clear what active profile was loaded or is in use.

(4): I think that we might also want to have a "modified" indicator on the main options menu to indicate that some options were changed since the menu opened. Maybe each individual option in all the menus can also have an icon image that is drawn next to the option when it is modified as well.

(5): Do we want to dynamically change the size (probably just the height) of the middle window based on the number of options available? Just a thought.

1. I like the tooltip idea 2. Yes, it should be shortened.3. Another good idea 4. It would be nice to do this, but eh (sideways thumb)5. Or do we want to scroll instead?